Most people have never seen a geriatrician. Many have never heard the word. So let us make a proper introduction — because if you or your parents are over 65, a geriatrician may be the most important specialist you've never considered seeing.
A geriatrician is a doctor who has trained specifically in the health of older people. Dr. Cheryl Johnson, Age Brightly's head geriatrician, describes it simply: geriatricians are the paediatricians of older age. Where a paediatrician understands how a child's body develops and what it needs at each stage, a geriatrician understands how the aging body changes, what diseases are most likely to emerge, and — critically — how those diseases interact with each other.
That last part is where geriatric medicine becomes genuinely different. Most medical specialists focus on a single system: cardiologists look at the heart, neurologists at the brain, orthopaedic surgeons at the bones. For a younger patient with one isolated issue, that works well. But for an older person living with three or four overlapping conditions, a specialist looking at just one piece of the picture can easily miss what's driving it.
Geriatricians look at all of it. Mobility, cognition, medications, nutrition, mood, hearing, vision, social connection — and how these domains are affecting each other. Dr. Johnson describes herself as "a jack of all trades but a master of the old." That breadth, in the context of aging, is not a weakness. It's the entire point.
To illustrate why this matters, consider Margaret — a 74-year-old Age Brightly member. She visited her GP and mentioned she'd stopped playing golf because her balance felt off, and she'd had a couple of falls. She was taking a sedative to help with sleep. She'd lost a little weight. Blood tests came back largely unremarkable.
A 15-minute GP appointment, with an already-stretched doctor, is unlikely to catch what a geriatrician sees in that picture. But Dr. Johnson saw: a grip strength decline (an independent marker of frailty), an elevated osteoporosis risk, potential medication interactions including the sedative contributing to her balance issues, and early cognitive change — which itself may have been partly medication-driven.
None of these flags were obvious in isolation. Together, they formed a clear and actionable picture — one that a whole-of-person clinical approach could start to address before any of them became a crisis.
There are only two private geriatricians in Auckland. The public wait to see one is around nine months. Age Brightly was built specifically to change that access equation — to bring geriatric expertise to people proactively, before the hospital admission that currently triggers a referral.
If you're over 65, or if your parents are, a geriatrician-led assessment isn't a luxury. It's arguably the most sensible health investment you can make.
Talk to our Brightly team today.